Post Script

Can Half-Life: Alyx make the case for consumer VR?

The odd thing about reviewing Half-Life: Alyx is that it isn’t just a game. It isn’t even a systemseller, in the traditional sense of that term. It has been specifically designed to make the argument for an entire medium, to do for capital-V-virtual capital-R-reality what Super Mario 64 did for 3D. So asking if it’s the best VR experience we’ve ever had isn’t quite enough. (For the record, though: allowing for the fact that Tetris Effect is almost as good on a TV as it is inside a headset, while Alyx is completely VR-native, yes, it is.) The question instead becomes: is that enough?

When Alyx was first revealed, it was accompanied by a sense that even the fans who’ve spent the last decade clamouring loudly for another Half-Life game were resigning themselves to not being able to play this one – largely due to the sheer cost. Alyx not only has to sell people on the dream of VR, it has to sell them to the tune of almost £1,000 (plus a sufficiently brawny PC to do it justice). This is, admittedly, only if you want the best possible experience. Valve is supporting pretty much every PC VR platform you could possibly name (which for most of us is a pretty short list). We play through Alyx on an Index, but also test it on the considerably cheaper Oculus Quest (linked to a PC) and HTC Vive. While the visual downgrade is noticeable, it doesn’t hurt the game too much. The bigger constraint, for our money, isn’t a technical one at all. It has to do with space.

Valve is trying to solve this by making Alyx as flexible as possible in terms of how it’s played. You can play at full room-scale, free to wander as far as your physical walls will allow – but, as long as you’ve got enough room to swing a headcrab, there’s also the option to play it standing up or even sitting at your desk. (In this case, crouching and standing is handled with a button press, and as long as you’re not too prone to motion sickness, we’d recommend switching to the stick-based ‘continuous motion’ mode, which means the whole thing controls more like a traditional FPS.) These are important accessibility considerations, and though it hasn’t been implemented in the build we play, Valve is working on a single-handed controller scheme.

But provided you are able to play the game at room-scale, it’s clearly the best option. The freedom of movement opens up so much of what makes HalfLife: Alyx great, letting you duck and dive and occasionally lose all sense of your position in the real world. And with that in mind, here’s the ugly truth: your enjoyment of this game is going to be directly proportional to the amount of space you have to play it in. Being able to potter around freely without fear of destroying furniture or squashing beloved pets is hugely important.

With VR, physical space becomes an extra system requirement to take into consideration – and even those of us who find the allure of Alyx enough to drop a grand on an Index are unlikely to also shell out for a new living room. And even that might not be enough. We play in optimal conditions – a spacious room, all but cleared of obstacles – and still frequently find ourselves brushing up against the translucent boundary wall in-game.

Some of Alyx’s best moments involve you being in the dark, or a tightly enclosed space, and often both. VR is excellent at creating tension in these moments, wrapping you in the absence of light, squeezing on your sense of claustrophobia. But the effect is somewhat marred by the presence, if you happen to be stood in the wrong place, of a gridded cage that cuts through the darkness. It’s far from a deal-breaker – clearly, given how much we enjoy Alyx – but they are the kind of things you need to be willing to shrug off as a limitation of the technology. Which, when you’re trying to convert people to the joys of virtual reality, is not the greatest sales pitch. Worse, it’s a problem we can’t see a solution to, at least not from a technical perspective – and warehouse-sized VR arcades, much as we’d love to see them, don’t feel like a realistic prospect.

This all gets to the strange contradiction that’s right at the heart of VR. The common argument for the technology is immersion: that with this virtual world wrapped all around you, it’s easier to convince your brain it’s real. But there’s also more that can wrench you out of it – the occasional tug of a cable, or the occasional itchiness of foam pressed firmly against your forehead. These are the kinds of problems currently sat at the top of Valve’s to-do list, hardware-wise, but the simple fact of simultaneously existing in two overlapping spaces means you’re playing not just playing the game itself but often a second metagame, as you try to reason where you are outside of the headset and whether you’re about to bump into something.

Occasionally, even with the presence of that gridded wall, we manage to let go of that second layer. The game envelops us entirely, and it’s a magical moment – until we bump shin-first into a chair, or punch a wall. Honestly, the experience of playing Alyx is worth these minor battle scars, but VR more broadly? We’re not sure whether it ever will be.

Alyx not only has to sell people on the dream of VR, it has to sell them to the tune of almost £1,000